Educate the Public
This column in Broadcasting & Cable is right on about Fox News. Fox sells, and that’s the big ethical problem news media face today – making money. Fox can sell its soul and rake in the bucks from the conservative public, MSNBC seems to be doing the opposite on the left, and CNN is somewhere in the middle. It’s not news, but the viewing public does not know that it’s not news. The cable news channels have gone to shouting heads, tweets, Facebook, etc., and constant injection of opinion. It’s entertainment and not news.
What’s needed is massive public education, which is not going to happen anytime soon. The pressure is on news media, and it’s all about money.
Somehow, SPJ, ASNE, APME, RTDNA, etc., must rise above the dollars and educate the public that real news has standards and is necessary to an effective democracy.
The changes we are seeing today in information distribution are similar in nature, if not format, to the changes seen in the advance of the penny press in the early 19th century. The printing press enabled mass distribution of information and hucksters, fakes, and politicians took advantage of it. Anyone with access to paper, ink, and a press could publish just about anything. Today, anyone with access to a computer – a much larger base – can publish just about anything. It took decades and organizations such as SPJ to bring sanity to news reporting.
We are in a period of change, and we will be for decades. We can’t throw up our hands, saying we’re better than they are. We have to educate the public and show that we are. And right now, the public does not have a very high opinion of news media. What are needed are a news media coalition and a grassroots campaign. Excuse the expression, but we need a giant public relations effort. The public does not care about checkbook journalism or doctors working for news media. It wants reliable information – the truth. And someone has to show the public the difference between noise and information. It will take decades, but it won’t happen unless we start now. Think big and be persistent.
Tags: APME, ASNE, Broadcasting & Cable, CNN, Code of Ethics, Fox News, Journalism ethics, MSNBC, RTDNA, SPJ
February 12th, 2010 at 4:49 am
Paul, I agree emphatically with your major point (“… someone has to show the public the difference between noise and information”), though I would probably rephrase it to “help the public understand how to distinguish between noise and information.” But I differ with you in one important regard on the means for getting there.
You say, “The public does not care about checkbook journalism or doctors working for news media. It wants reliable information – the truth.” One problem is that there is no one single entity called “the truth.” Our Code of Ethics intentionally says (I speak as one of the co-authors of the code) “seek truth and report it,” not “seek THE truth and report it.” We all have differing perspectives on what matters, what to emphasize, what constitutes an important or relevant fact, and vive la difference. The public needs to learn how to think about such issues rather than looking in vain for a single illusory “truth.” That’s the only way they will be able to separate noise from information.
On the first sentence of the section I highlighted — “The public does not care about checkbook journalism or doctors working for news media” — I think you’re building a false contrast. It is only by understanding why purchasing news from central figures in a news story is considered unethical that the public will be able to make that distinction between news and noise. The same can be said for the issue of doctors working for the news media — which became an issue following the Haitian quake. The reason such practices matter ethically are not well understood by the public, and it’s our duty to explain it. Someone — and SPJ’s Ethics Committee is a good place to start — must help the public to understand that training a network’s cameras on the network’s own role following such a catastrophe can only distort “the truth” you say they are seeking. I have no objection to a doctor-reporter reporting a medical story; it’s a huge advantage. What I do object to, on ethical grounds, is the all-too-common practice of making that reporter the focus of the story rather than the healthcare (or lack thereof) that everyone else in Haiti must rely on.
Additionally, I think education happens through the pores, with specifics, rather than with abstract notions. (“Show, don’t tell,” as we all learned early in our careers.) I can tell you all day long that the public should only trust news that is ethically driven, but it will have little impact unless I also cite specific examples of unethical behavior and explain how they distort the subject of a news story and undermine its credibility.
The added benefits of commenting on the ethics of current coverage are that it lets the reporters and the news media generally know that someone is looking over their shoulders and it lets reporters on the beat know that they have someone to turn to for guidance and support if they are asked to act in a manner they consider unethical.
Peter Sussman
Also a member of the Ethics Committee
February 12th, 2010 at 8:10 am
Interesting point, but impossibly difficult, as you seem to note. There is no “single voice” for journalism and its practitioners, and any sort of “PR campaign” (though I suggest a different term) would likely die before it gets off the ground. Why? Turf wars. Yeah, even in this new age of convergence media and collaboration, there isn’t one voice for journalism – nor should there be. With thousands upon thousands of outlets operating in dozens of countries with differing laws governing news media, such a body and campaign would fall victim to cannibalistic ferocity.
Your response, of course, will be that’s why SPJ and similar organizations are so vital. And that’s why the code of ethics needs to be not only embraced, but also reiterated to journalists and the public at every possible opportunity. And, yes, that’s the proper response. So, more than “journalism” as an industry needing a public relations campaign, news outlets and journalists need to draw a line in the sand and say, “before anything else — before advertisers, before ratings, before circulation figures, before unique visitor site statistics — we must uphold ethics and our mission to inform the public as the central tenet of our profession.”
How you make that happen is a subject for, I’m sure, a much longer, intriguing debate.
February 12th, 2010 at 10:25 am
Forget journalism and the ethics code for this discussion. I should not have mentioned the checkbook journalism and doctor-reporters. That was distracting. The suggestion is to educate the public – to help youngsters to differentiate between fact and fiction. Because good journalism is essential to distribution of information and accurate information is essential to effective democracy, journalists must be involved – indeed, at the center of this effort. Yes, keep telling journalists the value of ethics, etc., but let’s get the media, educators, politicians, and others involved in a grassroots effort to teach young people how to tell fact from fiction. The benefit is universal and involves more than journalists. A public armed with the tools of logic, rational thinking, information analysis, semantics, etc., will not only benefit media, but governments, consumers, and the nation. A well-informed electorate can certainly help to diminish the nasty polarization that we are now seeing. And as I said, it won’t happen in the near future. But it must happen.
Paul LaRocque
An Ethics Committee member
February 12th, 2010 at 11:21 am
First, I would like to thank you all for discussing perhaps one of the most important issues our country and our world faces currently. I, also, believe that the standards and ethics that journalists adhere to will affect the future of democracies, as well as the liberties and freedoms it protects.
I would like to respond specifically to the post by Mr. Peter Y. Sussman:
“One problem is that there is no one single entity called ‘the truth.’ Our
Code of Ethics intentionally says (I speak as one of the co-authors of the code) ’seek truth and report it,’ not ’seek THE truth and report it.’ We all have differing perspectives on what matters, what to emphasize, what constitutes an important or relevant fact, and vive la difference. The public needs to learn how to think about such issues rather than looking in vain for a single illusory ‘truth.’ That’s the only way they will be able to separate noise from information.”
I believe it is the fiduciary duty of a journalist to report truth, period. I agree that seeking “THE truth” is misdirected. I contend that journalism is most useful, when it uncovers the stories of different groups and opposing sides; thereby, elucidating that each individual voice or group holds a single truth. Perhaps, the composite of these differing stories brings one closer to “THE truth.”
When the voices being heard and stories being read, however, come from individuals who must require a payment in order to offer a position or news spot, the whole process of seeking truth, in my humble opinion, falls apart.
This becomes especially malignant to journalism and its pursuit of the truth, when the media distributing these paid story tellers’ tales, omits the essential fact that this is a paid segment, while maintaining the title, image, and clout of a reliable news media source presenting reliable expert information (whether it be a doctor, an analyst, a political correspondent….etc.).
In my humble opinion, I believe a campaign to rebuild a relationship between the media and the public is absolutely called for and needed, as well as rules and standards that must be upheld by any source that wants to be considered a source for truth.
Thank you for providing a forum for this discussion.
February 13th, 2010 at 11:57 am
I believe The Literacy Project (http://www.thenewsliteracyproject.org/) matches what Paul has described. Journalists teach middle and senior high students how to “sort fact from fiction in the digital age.”
There is also a Center for News Literacy at Stony Brook University on Long Island. It is “committed to teaching students how to use critical thinking skills to judge the reliability and credibility of news reports and news sources.”
SPJ could support these efforts.
April 10th, 2010 at 3:22 pm
I, too, would like to thank you for opening this forum to the problem of bad journalism. I applaud M.E. Mason for stating the problem so succinctly.
However, journalism doesn’t need to teach the public anything. It needs to clean up its own act! First of all, not everyone who takes pen to paper is a journalist. Don’t you, the profession of journalism, have any standards about who may or may not call him/herself a journalist? Now you’re seeking even tighter protections for so called citizen journalists, a euphemism for anyone with a computer and an opinion.
You need to professionalize in the truest sense of the word. Start by following your own Code of Ethics! That’s ALL you have to do! So few members of journalism follow its own Code of Ethics that the current malignant environment exists. People lives are RUINED because medialoid (mainstream media infected by tabloid journalism) hides behind the First Amendment while they tear down society by pandering to humankind’s basest instincts. From its presumed position as the final arbiters of what people should be thinking about, they smell blood in the water and circle the victim like a pack of braying hyenas. Snarling jackals all.
For example, there isn’t a human being alive who could’ve withstood the onslaught of lies, innuendo and slander that was heaped on Michael Jackson for well over 20 years. You’re next, Tiger. Here’s what you have to look forward to.
Jackson’s Image Remained Heavily Burdened
http://www.mediatenor.org/newsletters.php?id_news=260
Journalists! Examine your own hearts and think how you would feel if you were slandered as Jackson was for nearly half his life. It’s a testament to the man’s character that he persevered as he did.
Michael Jackson: The Wounded Messenger
http://tinyurl.com/ngxb25
Michael Jackson: The Man in the Mirror
http://tinyurl.com/yej8lwr
The Lynching of Michael Jackson
http://www.apj.us/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2474&Itemid=2
There are millions upon millions of Michael Jackson admirers who are angry and broken hearted because of what the media did to him. Medialoid will suffer the backlash for years to come.
April 23rd, 2010 at 5:05 pm
Yes, journalism–not the public–has a big problem.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=126203294